SCHOLAR ISLAND

 

CAUSE OF WAR

"Thus spoke Zeus and gave the word for war, whereon the Gods took their several sides and went into battle."

                     Book XX, the ILIAD

 

     "The Lord is a Man of War, the Lord is His name."

                  (Exod. 15:3)

 

   "He entered the shrine alone and later refused to disclose what the oracle had told him, except that Ammon was pleased to see him. In his memoirs, he admitted that Ammon had told him to sacrifice to certain gods when in trouble (as Apollo told Xenophon). Afterward, the priest greeted him as the son of Zeus Ammon, granting him dominion over the whole world. Armed with the conviction that he was now a god, Alexander headed east again to face the Persians in battle. This time it would with an entirely different goal: to harmonize the whole world, not to Hellenize it."

Theodore Vrettos

Alexandria: City of the Western Mind

 

"The plague arose in Babylonia,

when a pestilential vapor escaped from 

a golden casket in the temple of Apollo."

-Julius Capitolinus

 

   "A similar plague appeared in Homer's Iliad, when the Greeks laying siege to Troy in about 1200 BC were assailed by a plague sent by Apollo. Homer's details are realistic: first to sicken from Apollo's "black arrows" were the pack animals and dogs; then the men began to die. Outbreaks of anthrax are devastating to both livestock and humans. The "Black Bane" anthrax epidemic that swept Europe in the 1600s for example, killed millions of animals and at least sixty thousand people. Like smallpox and other infectious material, anthrax spores can remain viable for a very long time and they can conceivably be manipulated by humans. But natural cycles of anthrax have attacked periodically throughout history, and the fact that the Israelites' cattle were spared while the Egyptian herds were struck has been attributed to the separate pastures of the Israelites. 

   Although neither the Iliad nor Exodus implicates humans in the anthrax-like plagues, the priests of Apollo and Yahweh took credit for summoning the epidemics, and that definitely reveals both the human desire and intention to wage what we now call germ warfare. The ten plagues of Exodus were most likely a series of natural calamities that were advantageous for the Israelites, but inherent in the story is the strong suggestion that plagues and biological disasters couldb e powerful weapons against enemies."

Adrienne Mayor

Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs

 

   "The planet Venus plays a central role in Mesoamerican culture, especially in the timing of warfare. The Venus warfare cult, recognized at many Mesoamerican sites by the images of a goggle-eyed deity known as Tlaloc, apparently originated in Teotihuacan, and can be traced at least as far back there as the sixth century A.D."

Dick Teresi

Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science-From the Babylonians to the Maya

 

"Blood and violence lurk fascinatingly at the very heart of religion, 'Homo religiosus acts and attains self-awareness as homo necans-that is, "Religious man" can also be regarded as "Man the killer."

Walter Burkert

 

"In Plato's Laws, the Athenian Stranger ominously predicts that "there can be no rest from evils and toils for those cities in which some mortal rules rather than a god" (713e4-6)

 

"In the Name of God, the Compassionate; the Merciful: Believers, why is is that when you are told: 'March in the Cause of God', you linger slothfully in the land? Are you content with this life over the life to come? Few indeed are the blessings of this life, compared to those of the life to come.

If you do not go to war, He will punish you sternly, and replace you with other men...'

(from the Ninth Shura, 'Repentance', of the Koran

 

"Islamic fundamentalism is an aggressive revolutionary movement as militant and violent as the Bolshevik, Fascist and Nazi movements of the past."

Professor Amos Perlmutter (American University, Wash.DC)

 

"Of all the ironies that we have encountered so far, here is the richest and cruelest. Those of us who live in the Western world are no longer at risk of torture and death by agents of the church or the state for believing in more than one god or no god at all. And yet we find ourselves very much at risk from the latest generation of religious zealots who have preserved the oldest traditions of monotheism, including holy war and martyrdom. The new rigorists include Jews, Christians and Muslims, and the atrocities of September 11 are only the most recent examples of the violence that men and women are inspired to commit against their fellow human beings by their true belief in the Only True God."

Jonathan Kirsch

God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism

 

Book: "Terror In the Name of God" by Jessica Stern

Book: "Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies" by Ian Burnuma and Avishai Margalit

   "In any case, since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of 'preemptive' state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled. Besides the unexceptional subversion and overthrow of governments in competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, death squads, and unseemly freedom fighters (e.g. bin Laden). It masterminded the killing of Lumumba and Allende; and it unsuccessfully tried to put to death Castro, Khadafi and Saddam Hussein....and vetoed all efforts to rein in not only Israel's violation of international agreements and U.S. resolutions but also its practice of preemptive state terror."

Amo J. Mayer

Le Monde

 

"We have the power to knock any society out of the twentieth century."

-Robert McNamara

 

"Overconfidence in one's own ability is the root of much evil. Vanity, egoism, is the deadliest of all characteristics. This vanity, combined with extreme ignorance of conditions...produces more shipwrecks and heartaches than any other part of our mental make-up."

-Alice Foote MacDougall

 

"It's the same old dream-World dominion" 

-Ian Fleming   Doctor No

 

"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war."

-Thomas Hobbes

 

"War is in no way a relationship of man with man but a relationship between states, in which individuals are only enemies by accident, not as men but as soldiers."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Social Contract

 

"And once again wars of religions are ready to devastate Europe. Boheman, leader and agent of a new sect of "purified" Christianity, has just been arrested in Sweden, and the most disastrous plans were found among his papers. The sect to which he belonged is said to want nothing less than to render itself master of all the potentates of Europe and their subjects. In Arabia new sectarians are emerging and want to purify the religion of Mahomet. In China even worse troubles, still and always motivated by religion, are tearing apart the inside of that vast empire. As always it is gods that are the cause of all ills."

Marquis de Sade   (end of 18th Century)

 

 

"....today my Government stands before the world drunk with power...

....We shall win one military victory after another; we shall destroy cities, industrial installations.....we shall kill by the million. But in my judgment, that course of action will lay a foundation of hatred on the part of the colored races of the world against the American people. In due course those installations will be rebuilt, not only on material foundations, but on the foundations of intense hatred by Asians for the people of the United States. That hatred will be inherited by generations of American boys and girls fifty, seventy-five, one hundred-yes, two hundred years from now. It will be the foundation of intense Asiatic hatred that will eventually vent its vengeance upon future generations of American boys and girls."

Senator Wayne Morse 1965

 

"In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of Power, not germs."

R.J. Rummel

Death By Government

 

"I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians....All of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, "YOU helped this to happen!"

Jerry Falwell

"I totally concur"

Pat Robertson

 

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting....but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."

Kurt Vonnegut

 

"The first, universal and always pressing cause of war, in whatever manner and for whatever motive it breaks out, is the same as that which drives nations to hive-off colonies, to seek land and outlets for their surplus population. It is want of subsistence or , in more technical language, the breakdown of the economic equilibrium....In the last analysis the original cause of all wars is Pauperism."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

 

"nations act as though they were insane....Every nation feels self-righteous, superior, and peace-loving, whereas foreigners alone are violent and to blame for everything."

-George Stratton

International Delusions (1936)

 

 

"As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of world government."

-Albert Einstein

 

"Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish."

-E.M. Cioran  A Short History of Decay

 

"War itself, if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for the rights of citizens, has something sublime in it, and makes the disposition of the people who carry it on thus only the more sublime, the more numerous are the dangers to which they are exposed and in respect of which they behave with courage. On the other hand, a long peace generally brings about a predominant commercial spirit and along with it, low selfishness, cowardice, and effeminacy, and debases the disposition of the people."

-Kant

 

"If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result of them all taken together must be a state of in-security, of fear, and of promiscuous misery."

-Albert Einstein

 

".....the love of power is the demon of men.....for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied."

-Nietzsche 

 

 

"War and Peace, which the vulgar see as mutually exclusive states, are the alternating conditions of the life of all peoples; each evokes the other, is defined in terms of the other as a reciprocal; each complements the other, they sustain each other like the inverse, adequate and inseparable terms of an antimony."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

 

"The time has come....to supplement balance of power politics with world order politics."

-Jimmy Carter

 

"Don't forget, there are two hundred million of us in a world of three billion. They want what we've got-and we're not going to give it to them!"

President Lyndon Johnson

(speech to G.I.'s at Camp Stanley in Korea)

 

The real cause of war has always been the same. They have occurred with a mathematical regularity of a natural law at clearly determined moments as a result of clearly definable conditions....1. Wars between groups of men forming social units always take place when these units-tribes, dynasties, churches, cities, nations-exercise unrestricted sovereign power. 2. Wars between social units cease the moment sovereign power is transferred from them to a larger or higher unit. ...."In other words,"....Wars always ceased when a higher unit established its own sovereignty, absorbing the sovereignty of the conflicting smaller social units."

Emery Reves

Anatomy of Peace

 

"Soon after being named Head of the CIA, Bill Casey adopted the idea of harnessing radical Islam to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and he convinced the Saudis to bankroll the project. Casey never dreamt that the undisciplined extremists would actually succeed in defeating the Communists, only that they might contain them in the mountains of the the Hindu Kush. By involving Islam's fanatic fringe in what he considered a never-ending mission, Casey hoped to distract the fundamentalists from undermining Arab government that were the West's allies in the region.

   As the holder of several papal distinctions, Casey would have shared the Pope's view of Islam, considering it a religion that denies the Divine Revelation. However the wily CIA chief appeared not to have taken into account that, since its founding in the seventh century, Islam has succeeded like no other force known to history in motivating men to kill or be killed in the cause of propagating their faith."

Robert Hutchinson

Their Kingdom Come

 

"The demagogues, crackpots and professional patriots had a field day pumping fear into the American people....Many good people actually believed that we were in imminent danger of being taken over by the Communists and that our government in Washington was Communists riddled. So widespread was this campaign that it seemed no one would be safe from attack. This was the tragedy and shame of our time."

President Harry S. Truman

Memoirs

 

"The image of a Stalinist Russia poised and yearning to attack the West, and deterred only by our possession of atomic weapons, was largely a creation of the Western imagination, against which some of us who were familiar with Russian matters tried in vain, over the course of years, to make our voices heard."

George F. Kennan (former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union)

 

 

"miscalculation is the most common cause of war."

James F. Dunnigan & William Martel

How to Stop a war

 

"A patriarchal state is one which is either rehabilitating from war, is presently at war, or is preparing for war."

-Berit As

 

"Let's not forget what the origin of the problem is. There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That's a nineteenth-century idea and we are trying to transition into the twenty-first century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethic states."

General Wesley Clark (Supreme Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War)

 

"The War system not only has been essential to the existence of nations as independent political entities, but has been equally indispensable to their stable political structure. Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain acquiescence in its "legitimacy," or right to rule its society. The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power. The historical record reveals one instance after another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, of reactions to social injustice, or of other disintegrative elements. The organization of society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer....It has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions, and it has insured the subordination of the citizens to the state by virtue of the residual war powers inherent in the concept of nationhood."

Leonard Lewin

(Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace)

 

"What does that ridiculously empty phrase-"national security"-mean in the age of ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Love Canal? Disaster doesn't need a visa. What does the phrase mean within a country's own borders for that matter, if natural resources there are so pillaged that "security" is a sick joke? There is no such thing as "national security" in a world where one State can reduce another to ashes within minutes, and where air, land, and water (which move, shift, and flow) are-for better or worse-shared."

Robin Morgan

The Demon Lover

 

   "Democide is governments killing their own people. What do you think killed the most people this century? Epidemics, war or democide? If you took a chance and chose democide, you were right. Only at the end of the century, when the truth has finally came out about the mass murders committed by the communist governments, has it become clear that democide was the great killer."

James F. Dunnigan

 

"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for. And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the 'haves' refused to share with the 'have-nots' by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."

General David M. Shoup (printed in the Congressional Record on Feb 20,1967

 

 

"We don't generally think of the twentieth century as being a time of vicious religious wars, but such was the case. Over 100 million people died in the twentieth-century religious wars.

   In the last few centuries, religion has been the driving force in some of the most devastating wars. In Europe, the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) devastated much of central Europe. In the mid-nineteenth century, over 20 million Chinese died in the religion-inspired Tai-Ping Rebellion. But the twentieth century dawned with traditional religions at the defensive as a major force. But the new political movements, communism and fascism, took on all the appearance, intolerance, and fanaticism of a new religion. Fascism tended to ignore traditional religions, although the German version (nazism) promoted its own pagan form of worship. The communists went further, suppressing religion as much as possible and replacing it with a "worship of the state," replete with new ceremonies to replace the traditional ones for marriage, death, and Christmas."

James F. Dunnigan

Dirty Little Secrets of the Twentieth Century

 

 

"The relationship between Christianity and Islam is....one of the great fault lines running between and through civilizations, with recurrent tremors reminding us that destruction can burst forth again where such deep divisions lie beneath the surface crust."

Dr. Carey , Archbishop of Canterbury

 

 

"War is usually the symptom of man's failure to make the most of his opportunities in time of peace, and the basic causes are not always cured by a resort to arms. They are more often neglected during the emergency, only to reappear, complicated by new problems, during a convalescence known as the "postwar disillusionment period."

Lynn Montross

War Through the ages

 

"The primary aim of modern warfare....is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. (The "machine" is society's technical and industrial capacity to produce goods.)....From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations...

   But it was also clear than an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction-indeed in some cases was the destruction of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.....Such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

   The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. "

George Orwell  

1984

 

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering (Nazi Germany)

                            

                         Victory of the Loud Little Handful

                                  by Mark Twain

"The loud little handful-as usual-will shout for the war. The pulpit will-warily and cautiously-object.....at first. The great, big , dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleep eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it."

   Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long, you will see this curious thing: The speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men....

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

Mark Twain

 

   "The evidence is so pervasive as to become virtually invisible against the background of the field, because it is the field. The terrorist (or, depending on one's view, the freedom fighter) is the ultimate sexual idol of a male-centered cultural tradition that stretches from pre-Biblical times to the present: he is the logical extension of the patriarchal hero/martyr. He is the Demon Lover, and society is (secretly or openly) fascinated by him. He walks with death and is thus inviolate, he is an idealist but a man of action, a fanatic of dedication and an archetype of self-sacrifice, a mixture of volatility, purity, severe discipline. He is desperate and therefore vulnerable, at risk and therefore brave, wholly given over to an idea. His intensity reeks of glamour. Women, we are told, lust to have him. Men, we are told, long to be him. He is sexy because he is deadly; he excites with the thrill of fear. He has been celebrated and evoked for centuries. Now he stalks among us."

Robin Morgan

The Demon Lover

 

"Thus we arrive at the final conclusion of an inquiry originally started, not for a psychological, but for a sociological purpose. What has been so far written is really meant to be the starting-point for a new approach to the greatest and most topical problem, not of this age of supreme anxiety only, but of all history: must wars, human nature being what it is; go on until the human race has killed itself off for good and all by mutual annihilation, or is there hope of peace on earth left for the non-violent who do not want to kill? The plain answer is that if it were true that all our ancestors have been carnivorous, or even omnivorous, predatory beasts, I would resignedly admit that, ‘human nature being what it is; wars must inevitably go on to that bitter end which may be as near as many of us fear. If there was never a fall, there can never have been and there can never be a redemption in the future. If, however, there was a most definite fall, if ‘human nature’ was originally not lupine but that of a peaceful, frugivorous, non-fighting and not even jealous animal which developed its present predatory, murderous and jealous habits only under extreme environmental pressure by extra-specific imitations of the blood-lustful enemies of its own species, then there is hope of changing our social organization and our environment, gradually or suddenly, in such a way that we can throw off the fatal wolf’s mask, tame the ‘archetypal’ beast in ourselves and restore mankind to its pristine state of ahimsa or innocence, so achieving peace on earth for men of good will."

Robert Eisler

(Taken from a lecture delivered to the Royal Society of Medicine, and was published under the title Man into Wolf)

 

"After the war is over, it's not over. Wars often fail to settle the original disputes, and they cause new ones. A bad peace can lead to even more destructive wars.

James F. Dunnigan & William Martel

How to Stop a War

 

"Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious, and the aim of the jest, the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to allusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints....just because the profoundest seriousness lies at its foundation.....But all this agrees with the fact that the sexual passion is the kernel of the will to live, and consequently the concentration of all desire; therefore in the text I have called the genital organs the focus of will.'

_Schopenhaur

 

"If we are honest, most of us who were civilian soldiers in recent wars will confess that we spent incomparably more time in the service of Eros during our military careers than ever before or again in our lives. When we were in uniform almost any girl who was faintly attractive had an erotic appeal for us. For their part, millions of women find a strong sexual attraction in the military uniform, particularly in time of war."

J. Glenn Gray

The Warriors

 

   "Casual encounters are charged with a raw, high-voltage sexual energy that smacks of the self-destructive lust of war itself. The erotic in war is like the rush of battle. It overwhelms the participants. Women who might not otherwise be hailed as beauties are endowed with the charms of Helen. Men endowed with little more than the power to kill are lionized and desired. Bodies, just as they lie scattered and immobile a few hundred yards away, become tools, objects to an end. The fleeting sexual encounters, intense, overpowering, and largely anonymous, deflate with tremendous speed and leave behind guilt, even disgust, and a void that expands into a swamp of loneliness. Stay long enough in war and real love, real tenderness and connection, becomes nearly impossible. Sex in war is another variant of the drug of war."

Chris Hedges

War is a force that Gives Us Meaning

 

 

"If you are dealing with True Believers, of either the religious or political variety, you are going to have a difficult time preventing or ending the conflict. Combatants lacking ideological motivations are more open to negotiations. True believers often believe in fighting to the death."

James F. Dunnigan & William Martel

How to Stop a War

 

"...Virtually all the major tragedies of the twentieth century-possibly mankind's worst century so far- have been caused by secular and nationalist ambitions."

Shabbir Akhtar

The Final Imperative

 

"The outstanding feature of our time is insecurity. Epochs of this character-witness the Reformation and the French Revolution-have always been unfavorable to reason and tolerance; they have therefore been epochs in which dictatorship has its opportunity. And men always feel insecure when their privileges are challenged. They are not prepared to accept the invasion of their wonted routines. They seek to make their private claims universal rights; and those who provide them with the means of enforcing their claims are regarded as their saviors. The limits of men's faith in a reason which disturbs their established expectations are more narrow than they care to admit. Yet such disturbance always comes in an age of economic contraction. Whenever, , historically, the economic forces of society cannot contain themselves within the political forms-as, once more, in the Reformation and the French Revolution-we have moved into an epoch of war and revolution."

-Harold J. Laski "The Challenge of Our Times," Autumn 1939

 

Ghandi’s Seven Blunders of the World’ that lead to violence

Wealth without work.

Pleasure without conscience.

Knowledge without character

Commerce without morality

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice

Politics without principle

(Added by Arun Gandhi…)*.

Rights without responsibilities *

 

"Liddell Hart's theories of war, expressed carefully in his many books, began with the thought that wars are linked to economics. He went on to modify these ideas and link war with psychology. Eventually he concluded that war was 'personal' in the sense that it was an expression of the attitudes of men in power. My study of military history supports that theory."

Len Deighton

Tactical Genius in Battle

 

"Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance....The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor....the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene."

Hannah Arendt

On Violence

 

 

"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safe-guarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process."

Woodrow Wilson (1907)

 

"Conflicting economic interest is relatively unimportant as a cause of war."

Frank Hyneman Knight

 

"Modern pacifism and modern international morality are....products of capitalism....As a matter of fact, the more completely capitalist the structure and attitude of a nation, the more pacifist-and the more prone to count the costs of war-we observe it to be."

-Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950)

 

"Until we understand how to transcend the mind, this seperative thinking, this process of giving emphasis to the "me" and the "mine" whether in collective form or in individual form, we shall not have peace."

J. Krishnamurti

 

"but nowadays, in spite of denials, the practice of war treasure continues to exist under the very banal form of the bullion reserves of the issuing banks, , or of foreign exchange, which indirectly represents gold. The best proof of this is that these reserves are put into circulation at the outbreak of war, and, at the end of the war, are said to have either increased or decreased. Perhaps this is the best way to identify the real victor in a war."

Gaston Bouthoul

WAR

See article: "Just Say Nyet " by Jacob Heilbrunn ,The New Republic, Mar 22,1999

 

 

The purely economic and military aspects of war are as crude, when judged by our modern technical standards, as the rest of the purely mechanical aspects of Aztec life. On the other hand, the ritualistic conception of war as the earthly re-enactment of the titanic struggle between opposing forces in nature has a quality almost Sublime. The political and economic frictions that brought about conflict were welcomed by the warriors as an opportunity to vibrate to the deep rhythms of nature, rhythms which met in a celestial antiphony in the Sacred War which the Sun fights each day as he, by his own death and sacrifice, ensures the life of man."

Aztecs of Mexico

G.C. Vaillant

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The Master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose; the subject class has nothing to gain and all to lose-especially their lives."

Eugene Debs(1855-1926) Socialist Party...the above was made in a speech in Canton, Ohio in 1916...two weeks later Debs was arrested for this speech, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years in prison. In 1920, while in Atlanta penitentiary, he ran for President and received nearly 1 million votes.

 

"it is a sense of powerlessness that also causes nations to initiate wars. This has little to do with their "actual " world situation or with the power that others might assign to them, but to an overall sense of powerlessness-even, sometimes, regardless of world dominance."

The Nature of Personal Reality

 

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the very few at the expense of the masses."

Major General Smedly Butler

1933-Armistice Day Celebration-Philadelphia

 

"The gift of rhetoric has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that were ever invented."

Stanley Baldwin

 

"…..More evil has been committed, i.e. more innocent people have been slaughtered, tortured, and enslaved, by secular ideologies in this Century-Nazism and Communism than by all religions in the history of the world combined."

Dennis Praeger

Think for a Second Time

 

"When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader."

Plato (428-348 B.C.)

The Republic

 

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency…..Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."

General Douglas Macarthur (speech in 1957)

 

"The fact of collective madness has yet to register on our consciousness. The obsession with total power; the manufacture and stockpiling of cataclysmic weapons far beyond any conceivable need; the relentless quest for superiority; the comparative casualness with which the suicidal nature of such force is viewed; the seeming acquiescence in the drift toward a man-made holocaust-all these are symptoms of a pervasive insanity. The application of psychiatric standards permits no conclusion other than that the governments have been gripped by a deep psychosis that is working its way, as in deep-rooted diseases, toward a hideous culmination."

Norman Cousins

The Pathology of Power

 

"Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetuated by disciples of altruism."

Ayn Rand

 

"I should like you also to reflect that its events could have taken place only in a world where man considers himself superior to woman. In what the Americans call ‘a man’s world.’ That is, a world governed by brute force, humorless arrogance, illusory prestige, and primeval stupidity…..Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men are objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It’s an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women-and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness-to death."

John Fowles

The magus

 

"Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory."

Hilaire Beloc

 

"For Marxist-Leninist theorists, therefore, modern war is a function of capitalist imperialism and a consequence of domestic class struggle. For them the abolition of international conflict requires the elimination of capitalism as the economic system of major nation-states. There is in Marxist-Leninist theory (at least until the end of the Stalin era) no such thing as a real choice, since the development of imperialism and war under capitalism has been seen as inexorable. It has been assumed that a grave danger of war will persist until a classless and stateless communist order is universally established. Since the 1950s and 1960s, however, a body of Marxist-Leninist doctrine has emerged in the Soviet Union that has considerably altered Lenin's earlier concepts. The major expression of this reapplication of Marxist-Leninist methodology and analysis is to be found in several recent Soviet military textbooks. Not surprisingly, in these publications international monopoly capitalism and imperialism continue to be viewed as reactionary and aggressive. Indeed, the danger they pose to peace, the Soviet writers argue, has been exacerbated in the post-World War II era by the growing influence of the so-called military-industrial complex-an alliance of the largest monopolies with the military in the state apparatus. "These new monopolies" comprise the economic basis (for) the un- abated arms race, for preparing for and starting a war. . . . ,for increasing tension throughout the world, and for supporting adventuristic military dictatorships and fascist regimes. Furthermore, according to these Soviet military spokesmen, with the development of nuclear weapons after 1945 America entered upon a new stage of imperialism in which weapons of mass destruction were being designed for use against the Soviet Union and other socialist nations. Only the development of similar weaponry by the Russians prevented this policy from being implemented, with the result that the United States was forced to adopt a strategy of "flexible response" (aimed at conducting aggressive "limited" and local wars with both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons) . This new policy ensured continuing profits for American military manufacturers and was designed to strengthen international capitalism without resort to catastrophic thermonuclear war. 
   Thus an important component of the new Soviet theory of war rejects Lenin's (and, subsequently, Stalin's) notions regarding the inevitability of war: "The time is long past when world wars caused by the existence of imperialism were inevitable." Instead, because of the "vigorous, correct" foreign policies of the U.S. S.R. and other socialist nations, most of the world has enjoyed peace for a comparatively long time. With the growing strength of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc, and with the increasing concern about the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, the prospects for continued peace will improve."

 

Why War ? Ideology ,Theory & History

Keith L. Nelson & Spencer C. Olin,jr.

 

 

"We have this new profession that has started since World War II, the defense intellectuals, who have never seen a weapon or warfare, and who are really more troublesome than the uniformed military….In the Soviet Union there are enormous numbers of academics who are paid by the military budget, and they want their funding to continue….It is about the same in the United States, which, all in all, employs more civilians than soldiers on defense activities. Worldwide there are 26 million people in uniform but there an equal number of people not in uniform who are paid on the military budget. Of course that is a tremendous political constituency…What the nuclear weapons did was to reduce security….The United States was absolutely secure in World War II. The chances of its territory being in any serious way, except perhaps the coasts, were nil. Whereas now you could eliminate every American in thirty minutes….So American security has gone from 100% to 0 in thirty years. Only a handful of people realize that; the average American feels very secure."

Dr. Frank Barnaby (Director of the Stockholm International Peace Institute)

 

 

"But perhaps the main lesson of all for me was that the war did not come to us of its own account by some form of spontaneous generation in the human spirit, nor did it come as a design imposed on us by greedy, ambitious men, armament manufacturers, international financiers, Freemasons, Jews, or any of the conventional scapegoats upon whom societies chose to inflict their own inadequacies. It was monstrously born of the way we all lived what for fear of telling the truth and want of a better word we called a life of peace. I felt that somehow, in a way I could not define, we too had contributed to the reaction of Germans and Japanese to the reality of our time. We had to share some of the responsibility in the matter as though we, through our deeds of omission, were the accomplices before but I hoped would cease to be after the fact of the war which we were fighting. Only by understanding how we were all a part, however opposite, of the same terrible contemporary metal could we defeat those dark forces with the True understanding of their nature and origin which was vital if they were to be overcome in a manner to make us all free to embark on a way of peace that would lead to a repetition of the vengeful past."

Laurens Van der Post

Jung and the Story of our Time

 

"The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept."

Thucydides

History of the Peloponnesian War

 

"We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives….and only when we realize….that you and I are responsible….for all the misery throughout the entire world, because we have contributed to it in our daily lives….only then will we act."

J. Krishnamurti

Freedom from the Known

 

"Profits are driving this arms race."

Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque

 

"Our fight is against some deviltry that lies in the very process of things, against something that we might even call demonic forces existing in the air. The forces get men into their grip, so that the men themselves are victims in a sense, even if it is by some fault of their own nature-they are victims of a sort of possession."

H. Butterfield

 

"No nation, no social institution, ever acquired coherence without some sort of a fight. Out of the fight came its myths and its heroes."

Thurman Arnold

 

"five great enemies to peace inhabit with us: viz. avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride. If those enemies were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace."

Petrarch

 

"I still believe that suppressed homosexuality has much to do with aggression."

Immanuel Velikovsky

Mankind in Amnesia

 

"Many wars have been avoided by patience, and many have been precipitated by reckless haste."

Adlai Stevenson

 

"It is possible, even probable, that hopelessness among a people can be a far more potent cause of war than greed. War-in such case-is a symptom, not a disease."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

"If wars and revolutions always come as a surprise, that fact may have less to do with the difficulty of predicting human violence than it does with the fact that there are presently more studies on the library shelf on jewelry than on war-so pervasive is our need to deny even the very existence of group delusions."

Lloyd Demause

Foundations of Psychohistory

 

McNamara: "Mr. President, the story has broken on the AP and the UP"

LBJ: "Yeah, I see it."

McNamara:…."Anyway, it’s broken. It seems to me…..we….ought to agree now on a statement that could be made by one of the departments-I presume the Pentagon….the statement that we would make….would simply say, that "during the night…the two destroyers were attacked by the patrol boats. The attack was driven off. No casualties or damage to the destroyers. We believe several of the patrol boats were sunk. Details won’t be available till daylight."

LBJ: "that’s okay. I’d just go on and put that out."

McNamara: "All right. I’ll take care of it."

Michael R. Beschloss

Taking Charge (from whitehouse tapes of LBJ)

 

"….Darwin did not invent the Machiavellian image that the world is the playground of the lion and the fox, but thousands discovered that he had transformed political science. Their own tendencies to act like lions and foxes thereby became irresistible "laws of nature" and "factors of progress" while moral arguments against them were dubbed "pre-scientific". The only text they would heed was "go to the ant, though sluggard," because ants waged wars."

Jacques Barzun

Darwin, Marx, Wagner

 

"As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable. There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation world government."

Einstein

 

"Only part of us is sane. Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer days of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and live in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who came after us. The other half of us is nearly made. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginning and leave nothing of our houses save its blackened foundations."

Rebecca West

 

"Capitalism carries in itself war, like the clouds carry rain."

Jean Jaures (French Prime Minister 1902)

 

"….Under patriarchy, this mystical blood-bond is broken, our fleshbond become the source of all evil. Under Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and State-Communism-the four major Western patriarchal religions-the compulsion to control or destroy the flesh of the other has been historically stronger than the stated desire of "brotherhood". This perpetual success of war and failure of peace is then said to be the "human condition"-but is only the condition of humans under patriarchy."

Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor

The Great Cosmic Mother

 

"....Let us build a Pantheon for professors. It should be located among the ruins of the gutted cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance to the ossuary I would inscribe, in letters six or seven feet high, the simple words: Sacred to the Memory of the World's Educators...Si Monumentum Reuiris Circumspice."

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

 

"….We suggest that the atomic or nuclear blast is man’s final identification with the Sun God, the final annihilation of matter/mother-and that this is the implicit goal of all patriarchal religion. If they cannot control life utterly, they will choose to destroy it. The nuclear technician is the ultimate priest of the Father, handing us his unholy mushrooms of rigid and uncreative death, a ceremonial sacrifice of mere objective numbers –without grace, hope, rebirth, or magic immortality."

ibid

 

"No one ever mentioned it, but thousands of men welcomed WWII as a way to escape their humdrum lives rather than a chance to fight for God and country."

Art Buchwald

Leaving Home: A memoir

 

"War is an organism! Something endowed with a modicum of autonomy, born perhaps at the moment of actual combat but feeding thereafter on the substance and energy of those involved!"

Gerard Klein

The Overlords of War

 

 

"I have seen so many wars and revolution in the world….Men do not know what they are, what they do. They do not know we are human beings, brothers."

Pablo Casals

 

"Wars are precipitated by motives which the statesmen responsible for them dare not publicly avow. A public discussion would drag these motives in their nudity into the open, where they would die of exposure to the withering contempt of humanity."

David Lloyd George

 

"We should have great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves."

Locke

Essays on Human Understanding

 

"Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him."

Paul Eldridge

 

"Wars are not fought for Territory, but for words. Man’s deadliest weapon is language. He is susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group mind takes over."

Arthur Koestler

 

"All wars are planned by old men in council rooms apart."

Grantland Rice

 

"Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: ‘We’re not free spenders-doesn’t know our like."

John ciardi

 

"Appeasing of governments which revel in slaughter is an invitation to worldwide catastrophe."

Fang Lizhi

 

"In strict confidence….I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."

Theodore Roosevelt (letter to a friend 1897)

 

"Despite the efforts of such intellectual giants as Kant, Spinoza, Rousseau, and others, we know little more about the general sources of international conflict today than was known to Thucydides more than two millennia ago. The failure to identify a generally accepted theory of international conflict has led some people to conclude that scientific explanations of such conflicts are not possible.’

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

 

"The Soviets are in a state of hostile relations with the entire world....In the beginning they waged war against the old government, then with democracy and the higher classes, then with the prosperous peasants and the organized portion of the working class, then with the entire people of their own country, and finally with the world. The West must never forget the Soviet Union's goal-world domination. It must at all times attempt to pull the teeth from the beast of prey."

Grigorenko (former Red Army General)

memoirs by Grigorenko

Norton Pub

 

 

"Thus the first thing which it is necessary to understand about war is that 'all' men are responsible for it, 'all' men are guilty of the passion to reactions against others which, enormously multiplied and harnessed in a definite direction, make war possible. The motion of a certain gland produces 'passion' in man, and in his ordinary state of subjective ness and illusion, this passion finds its outlet against others. This is man's ordinary state of being. And without a definite change of level of being, with out a definite abandonment of a certain illusory sense of 'I' ,no men-however cultured, however 'liberal'-are exempt from this guilt. At the same time it is necessary to realize that 'all' types grow passionate and quarrel. Instinctive types will quarrel and fight over food or women, emotional types over religion or ' justice' , while intellectual types who pride themselves on their 'broadmindedness' in relation to sex or religion, will quarrel and fight with equal bitterness over rival scientific theories or over some entirely subjective conception of 'taste' in art or literature."

Rodney Collin

The Theory of Celestial Influence

 

 

"It is the greatest possible illusion to believe a particular class, or interest, or country, or religion to be responsible for war. This idea is indeed the chief cause of new wars. And in its willful propagation by all factions against their opponents we see the corruptive process of criminality ally itself to the terrible but natural process of destruction. Even the fact that wars are occasionally instigated by real criminals cannot justify such lying. For passionate reactions are, on the contrary, a definite hallmark of man's ordinary state of being. And it can even be said that 'peace' , in the political sense, is merely the result of mil-lions of passionate reactions neutralizing each other by their very triviality and subjective ness."

ibid

 

"It is useless to think that wars and horrors and revolutions, etc. , are exceptional. What is at fault is the level of being of people. But nobody is willing to understand this and whenever war takes place, as I said, people take it as exceptional, and even speak of about a future free of war, as soon as the existing war is over."

Dr. Maurice Nicoll

Nicoll's Commentaries

 

 

 

"Weakness breeds war. Wars come when an aggressor perceives his potential enemy as psychologically and militarily weak."

General Walt USMC

 

 

"Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism "inevitably" caused war; and he discovered this only when the first World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914, Capitalism obviously "caused" the first World War; but just as obviously it had "caused" the previous generation of peace. Here was another general explanation which explained everything and nothing. Before 1939 the great capitalist states, England and America, were the most anxious to avoid war; and in every country, including Germany, capitalists were the class most opposed to war. Indeed, if one were to indict the capitalists of 1939 it would be for pacifism and timidity, not for seeking War."

The Origins of the Second World War

 

 

"What life has taught me I would like to share with those who want to learn... Until the philosophy which holds One race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned That until there are no longer First class and second class citizens of any nation Until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes That until their basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all. Without regard to race. That until that day. The dream of lasting peace, world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain in but a fleeting illusion To be pursued, but never attained....

Speech by Haile Selassie Emperor of Ethiopia

 

 

 

"Then came men who started to toy with ideas on how to reunite people. They tried to devise a society in which each individual while continuing to love himself above everyone else, would at the same time abstain from interfering with others. Thus, they imagined, men could live together in a harmonious society. Whole wars were fought over that idea. Those who fought firmly believed that science and wisdom and the instinct for self-preservation would finally force men to unite in a harmonious, reasonable society. and, in the meantime, these wise ones were in a hurry to exterminate the unwise who couldn't grasp their Idea, and thus prevent them from hindering its triumph. The feeling of self-preservation began to give way; soon there arrived the proud and voluptuous, who wanted all or nothing. To obtain all, they didn't hesitate to commit crime, and if that didn't work, they were prepared for suicide."

Dostoevsky

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

 

"Pavlov observed that after subjection to certain physical and mental stress, the animals upon which he was experimenting uniformly snowed symptoms of nervous disintegration, reaching a state resembling that of hypnosis. He soon realized than in this state the animals were highly receptive to suggestion. Subsequently these findings have been applied in various countries, to human beings. Men are brought to the breaking point, and those in command then impose upon them the notions they think fit. Today this technique, applied in full awareness, is by and large referred to as "brainwashing." But it seems clear that the same results have been achieved, more haphazardly-stumbled upon, one might say-throughout the ages. "

Andrew R. MacAndrew

(afterword in Notes From the Underground)

 

"On the other hand, from a psychological point of view the cult of military glory is not weaker in London than in Berlin, or in Rome than in New York. It is extolled in Venice, in Florence, and in Amsterdam. Experience shows us- that today. the Socialist states are no less susceptible to it. The will to power and the warlike impulses appear quite independently of economic systems and regardless of the form of the political or Social hierarchy, the organization of labor, or the ownership of the means of production and distribution. Aristocracy, feudalism, plutocracy, capitalism, communism or socialist economy, primitive or modern, slavery, free or forced labor, serfdom or smallholder-in all these structures we find armies and wars."

Gaston Bouthoul

War

 

"Could it be that the reason men and, nations are so unwilling to encourage the scientific study of war is that, they secretly fear the disappearance of their most thrilling festival and their ultimate recourse? For no Institute of War exists anywhere, though its creation would cost no more than a medium tank or a couple of fighter planes.

 

Gaston Bouthoul

 

 

"I am going to explain to you why we went to war. why mankind always goes to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. When one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Do you understand?" "

John Fowles

The Magus

 

 

"War is due to communal property, the very thing advocated by nearly all the demagogues who peddle what they call a NEW order. "

T.H. White

Meryln

U of Texas Press

 

 

"There is no basis for the Marxist hope than an 'economy of abundance' will guarantee social peace; for men may fight as desperately for 'power and glory' as for bread. "

Reinhold Niebuhr

 

 

" 'It is not until there is resistance that there is War. A conqueror is always a lover of peace (as Bonaparte always asserted of himself) ; he would like to make his entry into our State unopposed; in order to prevent this ,we must choose war.

Clausewitz

CAUSE OF WAR

Bureaucracy as cause of war

"There have been many explanations of how we got into the Vietnam war...But all the explanations come back to one. It was the result of a long series of steps taken in response to a bureaucratic view of the world-a view to which a President willingly or unwillingly yielded and which, until much too late, was unchecked by any legislative or public opposition."

John Kenneth Galbraith

How to Control the Military 1970 Harpers,June1969

 

 

"Our problem is essentially one of bureaucratic power, of un-controlled bureaucratic power which, in the manner of all bureaucracies,. . .governs in its own interest."

John Kenneth Galbraith

"Scaring the Hell out of Everybody" The Progressive June 1969

 

 

"On a national and international level, it could be said that catering to pride and glory adds up to war, famine, waste, depletion of natural resources, and ultimately, to species extinction."

Theodore Rubin

Reconciliations

 

 

"War is the price paid by nations for the exemptions they grant themselves-exemptions from objective reasoning and humility. That is why wars grind on to exhaustion Total subjectivity destroys alternatives and options more thoroughly than bombs destroy cities and villages."

 

Norman Cousins

Human Options

- w.W. Norton & Co Pub

 

 

"The trouble all starts, confusion reigns, when we stop flowing, when we settle down in fixed concepts. For once we do, discord is generated on all sides. All things are isolated and apart. Everything becomes separated. And when this un-happy condition is at hand, the wars begin, the social order falls apart."

Newton Dillaway

Consent

The Montrose Press

 

 

"Peace is the ego's greatest enemy because, according to its interpretation of reality, war is the guarantee of its survival. The ego becomes strong in strife. II you believe there is strife you will react viciously, because the idea of danger has entered your mind. the idea itself is an appeal to the ego. The Holy Spirit counters this by welcoming peace. Eternity and peace are as closely related as are time and war,"

Course in Miracles

 

 

"War is a judgment, that overtakes societies when they have been living upon ideas that conflict too violently with the laws governing the universe. . .Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes : they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations."

Dorothy L. Sayers

Creed or Chaos

s

"Wars to end wars are an illusion. Wars, more than any other form of human activity, create the conditions which breed more war. "

John Foster Dulles

 

 

"But now I know that wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with fire hazard."

Henry Ford

 

 

"But at bottom the war came because over the years a situation had been created-whoever was most, responsible for it-of fear, jealousy and hatred, of tremendous armaments ready to be used, of directly conflicting ideas in which there was no ground for compromise. No 'balance' of these forces had been possible. In all this there was no practical 'reason' for a war. But it made a war extremely likely. No one planned or wanted the war. But in the end there was no way out. "

Walter Millis

Why Europe Fights

William Morrow & Co.

 

"Now there is no cause of war more just and laudable than the suppressing of tyranny, by which people are dispirited, benumbed, or left without life and vigor, as at the sight of Medussa."

Francis Bacon

 

 

"We do not feel that a report can be made at this stage with profit, but we think we have observed that war does answer a real need in man, perhaps connected with the ferocity mentioned in Article Three, but perhaps not. It has come to our notice that man becomes restless or dejected after a generation of Peace. The immortal if not omniscient Swan of Avon remarked head in a sort of ulcer, bursts out into war. "War," he says, 'is the impost Hume of much wealth and peace, which only breaks showing not outward cause why the man dies. 'Under this interpretation, it is the peace which is regarded as a slow disease, while the bursting of the impost Hume, the war, must be assumed to be beneficial rather than the reverse. The committee has suggested two ways in which Wealth and Peace might destroy the race, if war were prevented: by emasculating it, or by rendering it comatose through glandular troubles. On the subject of emasculation, it should be noted that wars double the birth-rate. The reason why women tolerate war is because it promotes virility in men."

T.H. White

The Book of Merlyn

 

 

"Beyond this, those who disparage the threat of nuclear weapons ignore all evidence of the darker side of man, and of the history of the West-our history. Many times the nations of the West have plunged into inexplicable cataclysm, mutual slaughter so terrible and so widespread that. it amounted nearly to the suicide of civilization. The religious wars of the sixteenth century, the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth the terrible excesses that followed the French Revolution-these have been equaled and grotesquely outmatched in the modern twentieth century. Twice within the memory of living men, the nations of Europe, the most advanced and cultured societies of the world, have torn themselves and each other apart for causes so slight, in relation to the cost of struggle, that it is impossible to regard them as other than excuses for the expression of some darker impulse. Barbara Tuchman reminds us that the people of Europe were relieved at the outbreak of World War I: 'Better a horrible ending than a horror without end, ' said people in Germany. ' Is not peace an element of civil corruption, ' asked the great writer Thomas Mann, and war 'a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope? Englishmen cheered the news of war's outbreak all day and night, and

Rupert Brooke wrote; 

"Now God be thanked who has matched

us with his hour

Honor has come back

and we have come into our heritage. "

 

Robert Kennedy

To Seek a Newer World

 

ECONOMICS & WAR

 

"The dominant modern belief is that the soundest foundation of peace would be universal prosperity. One may look in vain for historical evidence that the rich have regularly been more peaceful than the poor, but then it can be argued that they have never felt secure against the poor; that their aggressiveness stemmed from fear; and that the situation would be quite different if everybody were rich. Why should a rich man go to war? he has nothing to gain. Are not the poor, the exploited, the oppressed most likely to do so, as they have nothing to lose but their chains? The road to peace, it is argued, is to follow the road to riches. This dominant modern belief has an almost irresistible attraction, as it suggests that the faster you get one desirable thing the more securely do you attain another. It is doubly attractive because it completely by-passes the whole question of ethics: there is no need for renunciation or sacrifice; on the contrary! We have science and technology to help us along the road to peace and plenty, and all that is needed is that we should not behave stupidly, irrationally, cutting into our own flesh. The message to the poor and discontented is that they must not impatiently upset or kill the goose that will assuredly, in due course, lay golden eggs also for them. And the message to the rich is that they must be intelligent enough from time to time to help the poor, because this is the way by which they will become richer still."

E.F. Schumacher

Small is beautiful

 

 

"History is the most dangerous product ever concocted by the chemistry of the brain. It (history) causes dreams, it makes nations drunk, it saddles them with false memories, it exaggerates their reflexes, it keeps old sores running, it torments them when they are at rest, and it induces in them megalomania and the mania of persecution. It makes them bitter, arrogant, unbearable, and full of vanity."

Paul Valery-

 

"But the past is just the same-and War's a bloody game. Have you forgotten yet? Look down and swear by the slain of the War that You' ll never forget. "

Siegfried Sasson

Aftermath

 

 

"War is usually made by civilians bold and defiant in the beginning but when the storm comes they usually go below. "

General William T. Sherman

 

"But the problem is that over the years the precise forces which have erected lovely cathedrals have invariably dug torture chambers. "

T.R. Fehrehrenbach

': The Swiss Banks

 

"But wars, be they between nations or men and women, break out over an accumulation of grievances stored up over the years. "

Thomas Thompson

Serpentine

 

 

"War is an old habit of thought, an old frame of mind, an old political technique, that must now pass as human sacrifice and human slavery have passed. I have faith that the human spirit will prove equal to the long heavy task of ending war. Against the pessimistic mood of our time, I think the human spirit. . .is in essence heroic...The beginning of the end of War lies in Remembrance. "

Herman Wouk

The Remembrance of War

 

 

 

"The history of the world is the history of the conflict and war between secret societies."

 

"There is not a single shred of biological evidence to show that man is instinctively aggressive and hostile."

Dr. Ashley Montagu

 

 

"Dr. Iben Browning's studies indicate that U.S. WASPs may be the most violent people to have ever inhabited the face of the earth."

Sue Mansfield

The Gestalts of War

 

 

"I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing-direct murder by the mother herself. And we read in the Scripture, for God says very clearly: Even if a Mother could forget her child-I will not forget you-I have curved you in the palm of my hand. We are curved in the palm of His hand, so close to Him that unborn child has been curved in the hand of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that sentence, that even if a mother could forget-something impossible-but even if she could forget, I will not forget you. And today the greatest means-the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion. And we who are standing here-our parents wanted us. We would not be here if our parents would do that to us. . "

 

Mother Teresa, (Nobel Laureate for Peace in her Nobel lecture Stockholm, Sweden Dec 11, 1979)

 

 

PATRIOTISM & WAR

 

"He who works to improve the civic, economic, social  is more patriotic than he who exalts his own nation at the expense of others or supports and justified its action irrespective of right or justice."

(Quaker view)

 

 

"The rise of the people called Quakers is one of the memorable events in the history of man. It marks the moment when intellectual freedom was claimed unconditionally by the people as an inalienable right."

George Bancroft

 

"Patriotism is slavery"

Tolstoy

 

"What produces war is the desire for an exclusive good for one's own nation-what is called patriotism. and so to abolish war, it is necessary to abolish patriotism."

Tolstoy

 

"Patriotism now presents to men nothing but the most terrible future; but the brotherhood of the nations forms that ideal which more and more grows to be comprehensible and desirable for humanity."

Tolstoy

 

"There is patriotism-the passion that makes us see human affairs as a competitive game instead of a common interest, a game in which 'Our side, 'by fair means or foul, has to get the better-inordinately-of the rest of mankind. For my own part, though I care very little for the British Empire, which I think a temporary, patched-up thing, I have a passionate pride in being of the breed that produced such men as Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Cromwell, Newton, Washington, Darwin, Nelson, and Lincoln.

H.G. Wells

1918

 

 

"The idea that the world should be divided into different countries, is a fatal mistake. It makes for wars, discord and hatred. I think of myself as the stoics did, cosmopolitan. I think of Austin, Texas, the same way I do of Buenos Aires, or Montevideo, Geneva or Edinburgh. I am a citizen of the world."

Jorge Luis Borges

 

 

(inscription placed under a mirror at the New York zoo)

"You are looking at the most Dangerous Animal in the world. It alone, of all the animals that ever lived, can exterminate (and has) Entire species of animals. Now it has achieved the power to wipe out all life on Earth.

 

 

 

"Look back over the pages of history; consider the feelings with which we now regard wars that our forefathers in their time supported. . .see how powerful and deadly are the fascinations of passion and of pride."

Gladstone 1879

 

"People of the United States! Your Rulers are precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity! Why sleep you thoughtless on the verge, as though this was not your business, or Murder could be hid from the sight of God by a few flimsy rags called banners? Awake and arrest the work of butchery ere it shall be too late to preserve your souls from the guilt of wholesale slaughter!"

Horace Greeley New York Tribune 1846 (at the beginning of the US war on Mexico)

 

"wars are not 'caused' by international conflicts of interest. Proper' logical sequence Would make it more often accurate to say that war-making societies require-and thus bring about conflicts."

 

-Report from Iron Mountain

 

 

WAR AS SIN

 

"War is surely the great, prototypical example of group sin. It is a massive, organized violation of all ethics and all laws, a purposive and sanctioned campaign of destructiveness. All behaviors ordinarily regarded as criminal and/or sinful are suddenly sanctioned-murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, deceit, trespassing, sabotage, vandalism, and cruelty."

 

Dr. Karl Menninger

 

GOLD & WAR

 

"Mr. Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have been in love with gold. I love its color, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I love the texture of gold, that soft slimness that I have learned to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar within one Karat. And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup. But above all, Mr. Bond, I love the power that gold alone gives to its owner-the magic of controlling energy, exacting labor, fulfilling one's every wish and whim and, when need be, purchasing bodies, minds, even souls. "

Ian Fleming

Goldfinger

 

 

"God rules in Heaven, and money on earth. Even the Devil dances for gold. "

Zurich Proverb

 

 

He who has the gold rules"

(Zurich version of the golden rule)

 

 

"But nowadays, in spite of denials, the practice of war treasure continues to exist under the very banal form of the bullion reserves of the issuing banks, or of foreign exchange, which indirectly represents gold. The best proof of this is that these reserves are put into circulation at the outbreak of war, and, at the end of the war, are said to have either increased or decreased. Perhaps this is the best way to identify the real victor in a war. "

Gaston Bouthoul

 

 

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought of unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. "

Eisenhower

1961 Farewell address to the nation

 

"It is an organization or a complex of organizations and not a conspiracy. ...In the conspirational view, the military power is a coalition of generals and conniving industrialists. The goal is mutual enrichment: they arrange elaborately to feather each other' s nests. The industrialists are the 'deus ex machina; ' their agents make their way around Washington arranging the pay-off.. .There is some enrichment and some - graft. Insiders do well. . .nonetheless, the notion of a conspiracy to enrich the corrupt is gravely damaging to an understanding of military power. . . .Ethereality is far less dramatic and far more difficult of solution. The reality is a complex of organizations pursuing their some-times diverse but generally common goals The participants in these organizations are mostly honest men...They live on their military pay or their salaries as engineers, scientists, 'or managers, or their pay and profits as executives, and would not dream of offering or accepting a bribe...The problem is not conspiracy or corruption, but unchecked rule. And being unchecked, this rule reflects not the national need but the bureaucratic need.. ."

John Kenneth Galbraith

How to Control the Military

Signet Books , 1969

 

"If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable of, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of governments. The invention of commerce has arisen since those governments began, and is the greatest approach towards universal civilization, that has yet been made by any means not immediately flowing from moral principles."

 

Tom Paine

(about 1800)

 

"Current debates over where and how to drill for oil in this country soon may be rendered irrelevant by a nation desperate to maintain its quality of life and economic productivity. War over access to the diminishing supply of oil may be inevitable unless the United States and other countries act now to develop alternatives to their dependence on oil."

-Senator Mark Hatfield (1990)

 

"We need an energy bill that encourages consumption."

-George W. Bush (2002)

 

 

 

POLITICS & WAR

 

 

"For the statesman , war is first of all the easy solution. when the internal situation becomes confused and embittered , nothing clarifies it better than the declaration of war. War dispenses with the need to seek laborious compromises or to accommodate divergent interests. It may be said, paradoxically, that war ends quarrels; the parties often fight from an aversion to discussion. War gives governments a rest. It allows even democratic governments to impose silence, submission ,passive obedience, and] many privations upon their citizens, who are transformed into their subjects. Elections are suspended, and the leaders cannot be removed. War is thus the most flattering solution for governments, As soon as war is declared, the most colorless up-start politician becomes a sublime and haloed pontiff. The combatants go to their death in his name, and a crystallization takes place in them-the leader becomes and object of fervor and attachment. Even when the leader is cruel and dissolute, like Julius Caesar, or crafty and pitiless, like Hannibal, victory assures him the deep love of his soldiers. But here we find ourselves confronted with a religious phenomenon. War makes the leaders sacred. In Rome, the military leader was surrounded by pontiffs, augurs , and auspices. in certain circumstances he officiated and performed sacrifices himself. In the middle ages , the initiation of young knights included communion in mystic vigils of arms. Nowadays , the commissioning ceremonies for young officers , even among nations that officially deny religion, are surrounded with solemnly impressive ritual. "

Gaston Bouthoul

War

 

"I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it."

Eisenhower

 

 

"I know too much about war to glory in it. But wars are made by politicians who neglect to prepare for it."

Wild Bill Donovan

 

 

"It (corporations)  has developed into a separate center of power, a center of power which was never anticipated by or provided for in the Constitution, a center of power which has not been subject to the general laws dealing with business and financial practices, a center of power which gradually has taken to itself functions that go far beyond its original economic purpose."

Eugene J. McCarthy

Corporation: New Feudalism

National Catholic Reporter

"" Nov 5,1971

 

"The standard Oil Company is playing this war at both ends and in the middle. Their tankers operating under the Panamanian flag ply between gulf of Mexico ports and Tenerife ostensibly to supply the Spanish refinery. But in fact to, supply enemy vessels."

April 14,1941

Intrepid signal

A Man Called Intrepid

 

"First of all, top corporate leaders are interested in maintaining a stable world and a lasting peace. More importantly, they believe that the most important means to these goals the through international trade and technical cooperation, rather than military superiority. Few top corporate leaders could be characterized as "hawks" or cold war anti-communists. On the contrary, most favor improved relations with Communist nations and a retrenchment of U.S. military commitments abroad."

Thomas R. Dye

Who ' s Running America

Prentice Hall

 

CORPORATIONS & WAR

 

" I was shocked to learn that in the 1940s Aramco, a consortium of oil companies, sold oil to Japanese-and at a lower rate than it did to the American Navy. In the l93O's Standard Oil and General Motors sold I.G. Farben, the Nazi chemical firm, the secrets of the tetraethyl lead process that Hitler needed for his war machine.

 

General Walt

The Eleventh Hour

 

"The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm."

-Albert Camus

 

"When in the course of his State of the Union address in January,1968, president Johnson mentioned as one of his goals getting crime and violence off the streets, there was enthusiastic applause, far and away the longest applause of any point in the hour long speech. But when the President cited such goals as new and fair housing and improvement of race relations, there was not a clap to be heard in all of Congress. Thus the destructive side of the daimonic is deplored; but we turn a deaf ear, indeed play ostrich, to the fact that the destructive side can be met only by transforming that very power into constructive activities,"

Rollo May

Love &Will

 

CAUSE OF WAR

 

"Historians themselves might be added. In the nineteenth century, though perhaps less at the present day, they were fervent patriots, 'chaplains of the pirate ship' as Beatrice Webb called them. They presented the expansion of Empire as the noblest chapter in the history of their particular country. English historians glorified Queen Elizabeth I or the great Earl of Chatham French historians glorified Napoleon I, though less unanimously; German historians made do with Frederick the Great or even Julius Caesar. On a slightly more academic level historians presented international relations as a series of conflicts between sovereign states, shaped by the ever-changing Balance of Power and leading inevitably, even admirably, to major wars. "

 

A.J.P. Taylor

How Wars Begin

 

"Wars in fact have sprung more from apprehension than from a lust for war or for conquest. Paradoxically many of the European wars were started by a threatened Power which had nothing to gain by war and much to lose. "

 

ibid

 

"....Political scientists James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, drawing on a database of 161 post-World War II civil conflicts, found that empirical evidence does not support conventional wisdom about "ancient hatreds", or "clashes of civilization" as fuels for these conflicts. Instead, poverty and distribution of population seemed more closely associated with civil war, more unexpectedly, so was mountainous terrain. What is interpreted as a recrudescence of "ancient hatreds" may therefore owe more to altitude."

Karl E. Meyer

The Dust of Empire

 

"Freud concluded in a famous essay of 19O5 that "war cannot be abolished; (since) so long as the conditions of existence among nations are so different and their mutual repulsion so violent, there are bound to be wars." Later, in his old age, Freud was to revise this opinion, writing to Albert Einstein in 1932 of his hope that culture could be structured so as to meet man' s inner needs and thereby avoid war. There were two ongoing developments that the psychologist now found particularly promising: "firstly, a strengthening of the intellect, which tends to master our instinctual life, and secondly, an introversion of the aggressive impulse, with all its consequent benefits and perils." Almost unconsciously, then, Freud was moving toward that position which has become characteristic of present-day neo-Freudians (e.g. ,Erich Fromm,Erik Erikson) ,playing down the role of inherited tendencies and emphasizing the shaping power of society. Nevertheless, he left a vigorous legacy of skepticism about the extent to which individuals and nations genuinely and wholeheartedly desire peace. In our own era much of Freud's original pessimism and doubt has reappeared in the conclusions of certain students of animal behavior. The best known of these scientists, Konrad Lorenz(l9O3- is, like Freud, a physician and Viennese by birth. On the basis of his observations, primarily with birds and fish, Lorenz contends that there is an aggressive instinct embedded in the phylogenetic structure of all species. If humans and the lower animals had not developed mechanisms that inhibit fighting-mechanisms like status systems, the love bond, and ritualization their very survival would have come into question. As it is, according to Lorenz, the inhibitory controls imposed on aggression both through natural selection and through cultural processes frequently fail under the pressure of events. In Lorenz ' s own words :

"It is not so much the sudden, one-time great temptation that makes human morality break down but the effect of any prolonged situation that exerts an increasing drain on the compensatory power of morality. Hunger, anxiety, the necessity to make difficult decisions, overwork, hopelessness and the like all have the effect of sapping moral energy and, in the long run, making it break down. Anyone who has had the opportunity to observe men under this kind of strain, for example in war or in prisoner-of-war camps , knows how unpredictably and suddenly moral decompensation sets in. "Thus, when the aggression instinct is dammed up too long, or when the controls break down, any animal or group of animals can turn violently on its own species. An interesting if not entirely surprising variation on Lorenz' s views is provided by the anthropologist Sherwood Washburn1911-). Unwilling to accept the assertion that man is innately aggressive, Washburn contends that the problem actually lies in the "carnivorous psychology" which man has developed, largely as a result of having lived 99% of his earthly history as hunter and predator. "For at least 300,000 years (perhaps twice that) ," he says, "carnivorous curiosity and aggression have been added to the inquisitiveness and dominance striving of the ape." Washburn goes on to add:" The extent to which the biological bases for killing have been incorporated into human psychology may be measured by the ease with which boys can be interested in hunting, fishing, fighting, and games of war. It is not that these behaviors are inevitable, but they are easily learned, satisfying, and have been socially rewarded in most cultures. "Wars are therefore not engendered by our social system, nor by misperceptions and misunderstandings among men, but instead by destructive forces deeply ingrained in the attitudes of the race. Like others on the farther reaches of pessimism, Washburn seems to imply that mankind is fortunate to escape with only intermittent war."

Keith L. Nelson & Spencer C. Olin Jr.

Why WAR?

Univ of California Press

 

"What is lacking among....moralists, whether religious or rational, is an understanding of the brutal character of the behavior of all human collectivities, and the power of self-interest and collective egoism in all inter-group relations. Failure to recognize the stubborn resistance of group egoism to all moral and inclusive social objectives inevitably involves them in unrealistic and confused political thought.....They do not see that the limitations of the human imagination, the easy subservience of reason to prejudice and passion, and the consequent persistence of irrational egoism, particularly in group behavior, make social conflict an inevitability in human history, probably to its end."

-Reinhold Niebuhr

 

"From Tolstoy's vantage point, one comes to suspect that the very people who are allegedly trying to solve the problems of the world conflict by the wisdom of their policies imposed and executed by coercion and threats of violence-the presidents, premiers, ministers, generals, and national security advisors-are themselves, by the perpetuation of false assumptions, a major cause of the problems their offices exist to "solve."

R. Paul Churchill

The Causes of Quarrel: Essay on Peace, War, and Thomas Hobbes

 

"General Macarthur listened for a while and then told Sutherland he was wrong. that democracy works and will always work, because the people are allowed to think, to talk, and keep their minds free, open, and supple. He said that while the dictator state may plan war, get everything worked out down to the last detail, launch the attack, and do pretty well at the beginning, eventually some-thing goes wrong with the plan. Something interrupts the schedule. Now, the regimented minds of the dictator command are not flexible enough to handle quickly the changed situation, They have tried to make war a science when It is actually an art."

 MacArthur

 

 

"The wars of Peoples will be more terrible than the wars of Kings."

          anon

 

   "I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers-historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state-all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. And this is why for many war is so hard to discuss once it is over."

Chris Hedges

War Is a Force That Gives us Meaning

 

 

 

"Some of the biggest men in the U.S. in the fields of commerce and manufacturing know that there is a power so organized, so subtle, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. " "

 

Woodrow Wilson

 

 

"Men in a democratic or constitutional state are even worse off than those in a despotic one, because while the latter may be free even in the midst of violence, the former are slaves who accept the legality of the violence done to them."

Tolstoy

 

"There are many causes of war. Among these are the desire for power, the struggle for economic advantage, the desire to promote an ideology, revenge for real or imagined wrongs, and protection against encroachment on one's rights. One recurring cause, which peaceful-minded men should not forget, is that there are evil men in the world who wish to dominate their neighbors and to use them essentially as slaves for their own aggrandizement. Unless the rest of the world is supinely to accept their domination these men must be stopped. To gain their purposes such men do not hesitate to use whatever force may be effective. The tragic experience of history has shown that only when such tyrants can be met with greater force is it possible to block their ambition.

Arthur Holly Compton

Atomic Quest 1956

Oxford University Press

 

"The power to dominate and destroy through the sharp blade gradually supplants the view of power as the capacity to support and nurture life. For not only was the evolution of the earlier partnership civilizations truncated by armed conquests; those societies that were not simply wiped out were now also radically changed.

   Now everywhere the men with the greatest power to destroy-the physically strongest, most insensitive , most brutal-rise to the top, as everywhere the social structure becomes more hierarchic and authoritarian. Women....are now gradually reduced to the status they are to hold hereafter: male-controlled technologies of production and reproduction.

    At the same time the Goddess herself gradually becomes merely the wife or consort of male deities, who with their new symbolizations of power as destructive weapons or thunderbolts are now supreme....The story of civilization, of the development of more advanced social and material technologies, now becomes the familiar bloody span from Sumer to ourselves: the story of violence and domination."

-Riane Eisler, 

The Chalice and the Blade

 

 

   "This violence that is so embedded in each human being, can one actually transform it, change it completely, so that one lives at peace? This violence man has obviously inherited from the animal and from the society in which he lives. Man is committed to war, man accepts war as the way of life; there may be a few pacifists here and there, carrying antiwar slogans, but there are those who love war and have favorite wars! There are those who may not approve of the Vietnamese War but they will fight for something else, they will have another kind of war. Man has actually accepted war, that is, conflict, not only with him self but outwardly, as a way of life."

J. Krishnamurti

(talk given at Brandeis University)

 

"This war(WWI) has pitilessly revealed to civilized man that he is still a barbarian, and has at the same time shown what an iron scourge lies in store for him if ever again he should be tempted to make his neighbor responsible for his own evil qualities. The psychology of the individual is reflected in the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual continues to do it, the nation will do likewise. Only a change in the attitude of the individual can initiate a change in the psychology of the nation."

C.G. Jung

Two Essays on Analytical Psychology On the Psychology of the Unconscious

 

"Mankind strives fruitlessly, to no purpose, wears out its life in vain anxieties-because, No doubt, it has not come to know the limits of possession, and up to just what point True pleasure can increase. And, bit by bit, This ignorance carries life farther out into deep water; and stirs up, deep down, the seething' overwhelming tides of war."

 

Lucretius 65 B.C.

********

 

"Thus war breaks the monotony of a mechanized society. Some, including Aldous Huxley and Lewis Mumford, are of the opinion, that for these psychological reasons, the war spirit will increase within our society, as it becomes increasingly mechanized and dominated by technique'

Gaston Bouthoul

 

   "The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapid ness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble...."

Chris Hedges

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

 

 

"When our own nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent: But always esteem our selves and allies equitable, moderate, and merciful. If the general of our enemies be successful, 'tis with difficulty we allow him the figure and character of a man. He is a sorcerer: He has a communication with daemon; as is reported of Oliver Cromwell, and the Duke of Luxembourg; He is bloody-minded, and takes a pleasure in death and destruction. But if the success be on our side, our commander has all the opposite good qualities, and is a pattern of virtue, as well as of courage and conduct. His treachery we call policy: His cruelty is an evil inseparable from war. In short, every one of his faults we either endeavor to extenuate, or dignify it with the name of that virtue, which approaches it. It is evident the same method of thinking runs thro' common life."

David Hume

A Treatise on Human Nature,1740

 

"Looking back at the history of this war (Bosnia), one sees that the real causes of Bosnia's destruction have come from outside Bosnia itself, and have done so twice over: first in the form of the political strategy of the Serbian leadership, and then in the form of the miscomprehension and final interference of the leaders of the West. And yet every observer who has looked at the almost unimaginable atrocities committed during this war (atrocities committed in the first place overwhelmingly against Muslims and Croats, and later against Serbs too), has sometimes wondered whether there was not some deep psychosis within the population of Bosnia as a whole which finally broke to the surface. It cannot be denied that here are some gruesome practices, such as the mutilation of corpses, the knowledge of which has been passed down in a kind of tradition from earlier wars and folk memories-stretching back at least as far as stories of the feared martolosi of the sixteenth century. There were old men still in Bosnia who could remember such things from the second world war. But to suppose that this Bosnia war was some sort of spontaneous continuation of the inter-ethnic fighting of the second world war is to read from the script prepared by Karadzic and Milosevic.

   The atrocities in Bosnia in 1992 were not committed by old men, or even by young Bosnians nursing grudges about the Second World War. The patter was set by young urban gangsters in expensive sunglasses from Serbia, members of the paramilitary forces raised by Arkan and others; and though the individuals who performed these acts may have gained some pathological pleasure from them, what they were doing was to carry out a rational strategy dictated by their political leaders-a method carefully calculated to drive out two ethnic populations and radicalize a third. Having traveled widely in Bosnia over fifteen years, and having stayed in Muslim, Croat and Serb villages, I cannot believe the claim that the country was forever seething with ethnic hatreds. But having watched Radio Television Belgrade in the period 1991-2, I can understand why simple Bosnian Serbs came to believe that they were under threat, from Ustash hordes, fundamentalist jihads or whatever. As the independent Belgrade journalist Milos Vasic put it to an American audience, it was if all television in the USA had been taken over by the Ku Klux Klan: "You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line-a line dictated by David Duke. You too would have war in five years. But perhaps the best comment on the tactics of Milosevic and Karadzic, and on what they have achieved in Bosnia-more than 150,000 deaths, more than two million people expelled from their homes, villages and towns burnt and devastated, and several hundred mosques and churches deliberately blown up-is a judgment by another historian on another country's descent into blood:

   Like the protagonists in Dostoeyevsky's Possessed, the Bolsheviks had to spill blood in order to bind their wavering adherents with a band of collective guilt. the more innocent victims the Bolshevik Party had on its conscience, the more the Bolshevik rank and file had to realize there was no retreating, no faltering, no compromising, that they were inextricably bound to their leaders, and could only march with them to 'total victory' regardless of the cost...."

Noel Malcolm

Bosnia: A Short History

 

   "Today the declared aim of the Modern Jihad is the destruction of the State of Israel and of its Western imperialist allies-political entities identified by their religious creeds, i.e. Judaism and Christianity. However, its true targets are others: those regimes, such as the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia as well as Gaddafi in Libya, that block the formation of pure Islamist states, preventing the birth of the new Caliphate which will re-appropriate the rich resources of Muslim lands. Once the shield of religion is removed, the true enemies are revealed: foreign and domestic powers that economically exploit the Muslim masses.

   What we are witnessing today is a clash between two economic systems, one dominant and the other subordinate. This is the root of the the conflict between Islamist terror and the West. Retracing the economics of armed groups has exposed a wealth of real forces behind Islamist terror-commercial and financial entities that have been kept at the periphery of the world economy by their Western counterparts. The fall of the Soviet Union, however, opened up new opportunities for these Islamic forces in countries with large Muslim populations. The Islamic financial colonization of former members of the Soviet system was made possible by the alliance of these commercial and financial entities with Wahhabism, the strictest religious interpretation of Islam."

Loretta Napoleoni

Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks

 

 

"It is not the Americans, or Russians or Chinese or the British or French who are making war preparations or adding to their nuclear stockpiles relentlessly without any thought to the consequences to which the mad race can lead. It is a Fraction of the population, a few thousand, at the most, who because of their intellectual or material superiority, their skill at maneuvering, their gift of the gab or other talents, have risen to the top. When it is said that the Soviets have perfected a new type of missile etc., or that Americans have developed the neutron bomb, it is not the sociable, warm-hearted average folk pf these countries that is meant, but the practical headed, and often chauvinistic few thousand, at the top, who are behind the show. With a few honorable exceptions, it is the leaders and their henchmen, the politicians and their sycophants, the aggressive militarists, the industrial bosses and the rich magnates who, in every country, become involved in the machinations and maneuverings which ultimately lead to war. The excitement at the prospect of a war with a hostile country witnessed in the masses is often the result of hate created in their minds by their leaders. It is their exhortations that raise their passions to a white heat. In a sense the politicians, too, are not entirely to blame. Most of them are indoctrinated in or imbued with the ideas of the political theorists of the l8th and l9th centuries. They are not able to come out of the rut in which they have been brought up. If they could imagine that no political philosopher or thinker of the past would have ex-pressed the same views or advocated the same ideology, which he did, had the awful specter of a thermonuclear war and the drastic changes science has wrought in the human society in recent times, been before his eyes. The national leaders, one and all, still do not realize that many of their favorite ideas and pet theories, which they are determined to defend with nuclear weapons, at the cost of millions of innocent human lives, are obsolete and it is sheer folly to pursue them in the nuclear age."

Gopi Krishna

The Shape of Events to Come

             *******************************************

Book: "War is a force that Gives us Meaning." by Chris Hedges

Book: "CAUSES OF WAR: Power and the Roots of Conflict" by Stephen Van Evera

Book: "Rising Up And Rising Down" by William Vollmann (3,298 pp)

Book: "Nationalism: Its Meaning and History" by Hans Kohn

Book: "Blood Rites" by Barbara Ehrenreich

Book: "Civilian-Based Defense" by Gene Sharp

Book: "The High Cost of Peace: How Washington's Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism" by Yossef  Bodansky

Book: "Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency" by Michael T. Klare

Book: "Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks" by Loretta Napoleoni

Book: "Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence" by Mark Juegensmeyer

Book: "The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism" by Regina M. Schwartz

Book: "Is Religion Killing Us? by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer

Book: "The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious masculinity" by Stephen J. Ducat

Book: "A Pretext For War 9/111, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" by James Bamford

Book: "The Causes of Quarrel: Essay on Peace, War, and Thomas Hobbes" Ed by Peter Caws

Book: "The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History" by Phillip Bobitt

Book: :"Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies" by Peter Liberman

Book: "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia" by Ahmed Raschid

Book: "Preachers Of Hate: Islam and the War on America" by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Book: "Holy War: The Crusades and Their impact on Today's World" by Karen Armstrong

Book: "Crude Politics" by Paul Sperry

Book: "Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions" by Dominic Johnson

Book: "IRAQ and the International System: Why America Went To War in the Gulf" by Stephen Pelletiere

Book: "Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies" by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit

Book: "World on Fire: How exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability" by Amy Chua

Book:  "Cosmos, Chaos and World Order" by Norman Cohn

Book: "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" by Wilhelm Reich

Book: "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" by Erich Fromm

Book: "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude" by Robert Baer

Book: "The Politics of War" The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic" by Walter Karp

Book: "Terror in the Name of God" by Jessica Stern

Book: "Blood Diamonds: tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones" by Greg Campbell

© 2001

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